Society Wanted:
Grooms To Match
by Tabitha Nderitu
Finding a
husband is proving to be a Herculean task for well-educated women in
Kenya. And the hitch lies in academics.
In a surprising trend, enrollment of women students in Kenya's 24
universities - 18 private and six public - has surpassed that of the
male compatriots by a ratio of three to one. The phenomenon, of the last
four years, has got local authorities thinking.
According to the Ministry of Education, 60,000 students are enrolled for
undergraduate courses. Of this figure, 45,000 are women. Furthermore, of
the registered 7,000 graduate students, only 2,500 are men. This implies
that for every single male student there are three female students
studying at the universities. According to the 2001 Census, in Kenya
women out populated the men by a ratio of 2:1.
As a result of the enrollment disparities, in terms of gender, Kenyan
society is now witnessing women becoming increasingly shy of marrying
lesser-educated men.
According to a news research carried by 'The Anvil', a tabloid weekly
published by the University of Nirobi (UON), the scarcity of
well-educated men is setting in a new mentality towards the institution
of marriage. An editorial, aptly titled 'The Amazon's Turn', states: "A
paradigm shift is slowly eating into the Kenyan society and gladly it's
the previously eternal victims who have come of age, deservedly
asserting themselves as fit and ready to lead by tearing into sexual
stereotypes that have long served no noble purpose save to engender
servitude across the gender divide. For hooray, women have veritably
realised that being academically smart is liberating since one can then
be in charge of individual choices. And with proportionately more women
seeking higher education it is no wonder that many of them are choosing
to remain single rather than hitting it off with a man who is putatively
an intellectual dwarf."
One such example is Wanjiku Mugane, 38, the C.E.O of First Africa
Capital, a leading financial consultancy within the East and Central
African region. The firm handles gild-edged investment deals worth
millions of dollars. Armed with a law degree that is topped with a
Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Harvard, Mugane cannot even
think of tying the knot with a man endowed with fewer academic
qualifications.
"It's not that I am conceited... But today - with a good education, hard
work, and some luck - a woman can emerge as top-dog in her chosen
field," says Mugane, who for now has no intention of trading her chosen
life for marriage.
Fatuma Ali's story is somewhat different from single Mugane's experience
and yet, she, too, understands that a spouse's level of formal education
should be the decider when one is deciding whom to marry. As a Muslim
faithful, Ali, 34, went against the grain by marrying a Sikh. The
marriage ended after a protracted four years that intermittently
captured local media attention.
While granting her a divorce the Court Magistrate in Nairobi said her
husband had 'resorted to religious bigotry on realisation that his wife
was a socialite, a go-getter, and academically far more endowed than her
husband leading him to mistakenly believe that he was henpecked'.
In retrospect, Ali, the Marketing Manager of Bidco Oils Refinery, East
and Central Africa's largest edible oil manufacturer, says, "I must
confess that I was starry-eyed. I was in love with love itself and in
the circumstances I found myself marrying young. I believed at the time
that simple love was all that was required to insulate a marriage from
the vagaries that split up families. But I was wrong. Similarity in
cerebral thinking is indispensable if one is to be truly happy."
Ali, who holds an MBA from Bristol University, UK, now says that next
time love comes calling it must be accompanied by a competitive academic
resume.
Not surprisingly then that Muthoni Kimani, the Registrar of Marriages at
the Attorney General's office, in Nairobi, has witnessed a dip in the
number of professional women seeking to marry, over the past four years.
"I can confidently state that in all my 14 years in this office, the
past four years we have registered very few marriages involving
professional women. What we have witnessed is the strange phenomena of
very well-educated women marrying relatively younger men who have shown
indelible signs of solely being dependants."
Traditionally, within Kenya's patriarchal society, men are expected to
provide for their families, while women are expected to silently kowtow
to the dictates of her husband. Basically men stand to gain all material
belongings of a family. For instance, amongst the Kikuyu community - the
country's numerically largest community - when a girl marries, her
family provides a bed as a present for the newly weds. But the offering
has a deeper cultural context as well. It basically signifies that after
her marriage a girl is not welcome home, even in the case of marital
discord, as apparently the maternal home would have no bed for her to
sleep in! Therefore, men generically have no real need to seriously
pursue higher education.
So, if the men do not study, what professions do they take up? Most are
engaged in the informal sector, like selling second-hand imported motor
vehicles or running alcohol joints - basically businesses that guarantee
quick returns and do not involve heavy capital investments.
Local pundits argue out that as long as men continue to lag behind in
academics, an emerging clan of very well educated women, with serious
jobs to match, will choose to forgo marriage if prospective husbands
fall short in qualifications.
"In the past, women could not make personal choices. Today, many have
gone through a serious education and that is the reason the country is
witnessing a revolution targeting gender roles," says Lynn Muthoni
Wanyeki, Executive Director of the two decade-old African Women's
Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), an NGO that aims at
empowering women.
Concerned about the skewed gender enrolment at universities and its
spillover effects on society, authorities are now calling for speedy
corrective measures. "The disproportionate enrolment in institutions of
higher learning is alarming. In the short term, if remedial measures are
not quickly implemented to balance the apparent gender inequality, the
country will reap disastrous social and economic consequences that will
inarguably prove difficult to unravel in the long term," warns Professor
Mutahi Karuga, Permanent Secretary of Education, Natraobi, in 'The
Glaring Gap. Male Students Left Out', an official report.
Yet, nothing concrete is being done to bridge the gap. Perhaps, because
traditionally women have been discouraged from going to school and the
current change of attitude is viewed as a good thing because the
corporate world as well as the public offices are witnessing a balance
of sorts - along gender lines - at the top.
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